SUPERFAN

A rudderless first-year college student becomes obsessed with a new boy band.

Minnie Yang is excited to start attending the University of Texas at Austin. She struggles with her identity, having immigrated from China as a young child and grown up in predominantly white Colorado Springs, and she hopes that in college she will finally flourish: “Here, most importantly, was where she could reclaim her bright heart.” It’s 2014, and a new music sensation is emerging: HOURglass, a four-member group designed to have “the heart of Western boy bands and the training of Korean pop.” (Three of the band’s members are of Asian descent, while one is white.) Eason Chen, stage name Halo, is less formally trained than his counterparts and assigned the role of “bad boy.” Also, he has several dark secrets about his complicated family that he desperately wants to hide. Following a performance at a music festival, the band is catapulted to extreme fame, complete with highly controlling management and leagues of adoring fans. As Minnie flounders in college, navigating a messy relationship with a belittling older student and reeling from a destabilizing sexual assault, she becomes increasingly engrossed in HOURglass, especially Halo, finding in the fandom solace and a substitute for community she hasn’t found in real life. As the band’s fame grows, threatening the members’ health and friendships and Eason’s tightly kept, ruinous secrets, Minnie inches further into their orbit. Zhang writes about obsessive fandom with the knowledge of an insider, tossing in heaps of scandals and fandom minutiae (eating disorders! drug use! slash fiction! intense blog posts! manufactured fake-dating rumors about two band members!) that any boy-band or K-pop fan, especially ones who’ve been around since the book’s era, will recognize as more than plausible. Some of the prose comes off as stilted and oddly formal, and some side characters could have been more developed beyond tropes, but it’s affecting to witness Minnie’s and Eason’s hard-fought journeys to self-acceptance.

An earnest exploration of toxic fandom and coming of age.